I DON’T believe in the stock market as a concept and I don’t understand why anyone else does – apart from those who make buckets of money working on it, of course.

Now I do realise that the stock market does actually exist, unlike courteous drivers on the freeway, affordable houses in the suburbs and raw kale that tastes like anything but bitter and boring.

The stock market is, however, just like short-term loans, psychics and every single anti-ageing beauty product – a massive scam. The economists and financial planners try to trick us with pretty graphs, buzzword-packed analyses and huge numbers.

They’re the magicians of the stock market and, like all magicians, their job is to divert our attention from the big and simple truth – the entire stock market is a trick, one that has been filling the pockets of bankers, stockbrokers and millionaires for decades at expense of the rest of us.

Anything else that crashed so regularly or with such devastating results would be taken out of service. We did it with the zeppelin and the Concorde.

The very same people who caused it to crash are the same people we keep putting back behind the wheel. It makes no sense.

If someone kept crashing the school bus, we wouldn’t keep fixing it and giving it back to them.

We’d make that driver the assistant lollipop man and find a new driver.

Bankers, stockbrokers and other rich people aren’t in the stock market because they’re good managers of all of our money.

They do it because they love money, they’re greedy and they want as much of it for themselves as possible.

Leaving them in charge of the stock market is like giving a fat man a jar of sweets and saying, “Look after this for me will you?”

Then when you’ve retired and need your sweets, it’s too late because they’ve all been eaten.

The bankers and the stockbrokers with their huge houses, yachts, trophy wives, spoiled kids, hookers and cocaine, all that stuff didn’t just fall out of the sky – that’s your money at work.

Then every time the market does crash they complain about the billions they’ve lost and ignore the fact that they’ve always got billions left over.

It’s the people who lose thousands and have hundreds or nothing left, who lose their jobs, that cop the worst of it.

Any economic disaster affects the people at the bottom a lot more than it does those at the top.

So what’s the solution? Not the free market. That’s left us with the most volatile stock market ever and the largest gap in income equality.

There was a time when both parents didn’t have to work, homes were affordable and university was free and it wasn’t even that long ago.

Back then, the gap between the rich and poor was way smaller and there were far more rules and taxes on the private sector.

It’s time for financial sector reform and with that we need rules and proper income distribution. The rich might have slightly smaller yachts, but the rest of us will be better off.